Doug Monroe's OPENLY OLD

Assisted Living

As soon as I got out of the hospital after my brain scare with Toxic Metabolic Encephalopathy, my kids wanted to park my ass in an assisted living facility.

The one my daughter looked at was very nice. But it cost about $5,000 a month, which is sort of like renting a room at the Taj Mahal.

They say an assisted living facility should pass the sniff test: it shouldn’t smell like urine.

I’ve looked at two other facilities, both of which passed the sniff test. I took a tour of one with long hallways. All the doors were closed. Every now and then an old person would drift by me like a ghost without making eye contact.

I felt like I was in The Shining.

I think it was $2,500 a month. I started filling out the paperwork and realized I wouldn’t qualify because I have no credit rating following my 2024 bankruptcy.

I got up to leave and went to the front door, which was locked. Two firefighters were banging frantically on the door, so I let them in.

I couldn’t get out of the parking lot because an EMT ambulance pulled in behind me.

The guys ran in with a gurney. They came out with the rotting carcass of a skeletal old man with an oxygen mask over his face. He was alive. Sort of.

I wanted to scream.

Where the Elite Meet to Eat

I went to another one with cute little cottages and a nice winding street between them. I thought, “I could ride one of those three-wheel bikes on the streets!”

I met with the lady behind the desk. You would have thought she was accepting applications to Atlanta’s Piedmont Driving Club. She should have been wearing white gloves and a tiny hat. She said there were no vacancies and no likelihood for any, plus there was not only a high monthly fee for the cottages -- $3,500 or more -- but also a fee to get on their waiting list.

I slunk out of her office in shame and drove back to my home.

Home Sweet Home

I finally convinced my kids that I’m best off where I am. It’s a one-story duplex with two bedrooms and one bath about four miles from the University of Georgia campus. I’m 20 minutes from Monroe, Ga., where my grandkids live.

I like my neighbors. I’ve been here going on 10 years. The rent is $925, going up to $1,000 in July. In Athens, where the rents are skyrocketing because of the students, that is a deal.

Daddy

I’ve got a great deal, but I don’t want to be a complete asshole about going into assisted living like my father was. My God.

I took him a lovely brochure of a new assisted living facility being built at the old Stone Mountain airport, not far from where he and Mama lived then. He was sitting in his recliner, with his feral cat, Susan, in his lap, and sipping bourbon.

Without looking at it, he tossed the brochure on the floor, took a glug of whiskey, and laughed.

“I’m just going to drop dead one day and that will be the end of it.”

It didn’t work out that way. And he didn’t even think about poor old Mama, looking bewildered in her recliner and commenting like a parrot:

“Look at yo daddy drink his whiskey. Glug glug glug.”

One day he fell in the driveway and hit his head. He crawled on his hands and knees and passed out on the steps leading to the front door. A neighbor called an ambulance.

Mama said, “I wondered where he was.”

Daddy refused to go in the ambulance, preferring to stay in his recliner drinking whiskey. His knees were bleeding after scraping the skin off while crawling on the driveway.

My sister, Trisha, called me and I rushed across town and told him that in no uncertain terms he was going to the hospital. We called the ambulance and he went. They cleaned him up and found he had prostate cancer, so he stayed a couple of days.

We put Mama in a temporary nursing home where two old women named Ruby – we called them Ruby and Ruby Tuesday – listened to the caterwauling of white Gospel music all the time. Mama preferred the Beatles.

Trisha found an assisted living facility in Decatur that seemed fairly clean. So we moved Mama and Daddy into it. Mama lived there about five years and died in a nearby nursing home at age 85. Daddy drifted on and on.

Assisted living

Trisha and I took turns taking him Sunday dinners – we called it “Daddy duty,” which devolved into “diddy doody.”

His only request was for peanut brittle and whiskey. By that time, I lived in Brooklyn, so I asked my daughter, Caroline, to take him some peanut brittle and a fifth of Jim Beam. At first she refused, but I said, “I live in Brooklyn. Your brother lives in Philadelphia. Please take it.”

She took it to him on Sunday. I got a call in Brooklyn from the facility. The caller said, “Someone has given your father whiskey.” It turns out he drank the whole fifth in one night and went down to breakfast drunk. He fell off his walker, bounced, and puked.

“Party till it sucks,” my son said later.

As for the smell test, the place seemed clean until one day Trisha and I were walking down the hallway and the door of a room opened and we heard an old couple screaming at each other. They were throwing their dirty Depends at each other.

Ah, love.

Daddy was finally moved to a nearby nursing home after he fell in the shower and broke his shoulder. After that, he moved into two different hospice facilities, which kicked him out because he wouldn’t die.

“He’s growing new organs, like a frog,” I told Trisha.

He finally moved into an illegal nursing home run by Serbian women. It was wonderful. They kept him sparkling clean.

Trisha said she was going to visit him and ask for him to “go to the light.”

I suggested she take a flashlight. She did not. He finally died, at age 93.

The closer I get to death, the more I realize how much I love my parents. My spiritual guides tell me that when we are going to reincarnate, we choose the families we will join.

Party till it sucks!

Doug Monroe is 78 and hopes his readers will find this newsletter about aging to be helpful, hilarious, and horrifying. Doug was an award-winning journalist for United Press International, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Atlanta Magazine, and Creative Loafing. He also was a New York City Teaching Fellow.